The state of play in machine/environment interactions

Due to the breadth of the subject, it is no longer possible to provide a review of all of the work being carried out in the field of Artificial Intelligence. However, a more localised review of research taking place in the overlap between engineering, AI and psychology can be meaningfully performed. We show here that while there have been marked successes in the past few years, there is an identifiable set of ‘classic’ problems that remain to be solved, and which largely direct the work ongoing in this area. This review aims to discuss the directions being taken at the current time, in particular the developing and maturing possibilities provided by neural networks and evolutionary computation, and by the use of our knowledge of the mind in developing artificial agents capable of mimicking our abilities to interact with the environment.